A network device may include a forwarding board and at least two interface boards. The forwarding board is one board, which takes charge of forwarding and processing network packets. The interface board possesses an out interface of a physical network, which is in charge of transmitting and receiving network packets. Besides, a forwarding board may be connected with each interface board, by using a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCI-E) bus.
When interconnecting the forwarding board with the interface board by using the PCI-E bus, how to improve forwarding performance among different interface boards, and reduce occupancy rate of centrol processing unit (CPU) in a forwarding board may be taken into account.